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Madison Jones, novelist, was born in Nashville and grew up on a farm located on Franklin Pike. After military service in and immediately after World War II, Jones completed a B.A. at Vanderbilt University, where he studied under Monroe Spears…

A flamboyant Methodist evangelist, Samuel Jones came to Nashville in 1885 as the result of a boast he made in Memphis that no church in the "city of churches" would be able to contain the crowds he would attract. When…

The oldest town in Tennessee, Jonesborough was chartered by the State of North Carolina in 1779 and laid out in 1780. Named for Willie Jones, a resident of Halifax, North Carolina, who supported the western settlements, the town served as…

Fisk Free School opened its doors in January 1866 in Nashville near what is today the site of Union Station. At the time, the campus's only buildings consisted of small, wooden hospital barracks originally built to serve Union soldiers who…

In 1871, only four years after the incorporation of Fisk Free School as Fisk University in Nashville, the school for emancipated African Americans faced impending closure. Classrooms and living quarters continued to be housed in the decaying barracks of the…

Sears, Roebuck and Company magnate Julius Rosenwald created the Julius Rosenwald Fund (JRF) in 1917 to coordinate his contributions for African American education. Guided by Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald supported the expansion of public education for rural southern blacks within…

George Kabalka, pioneer in the use of organoborane chemistry in the area of radiopharmaceuticals containing short-lived nuclides, was born in Wyandotte, Michigan, February 1, 1943. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1965 and his Ph.D.…

An important twentieth-century architect, Edwin A. Keeble was born in Monteagle Assembly, the fourth of six children of John Bell and Emmie Frazer Keeble. His father was a Nashville attorney and later the dean of the Vanderbilt University Law School.…

Marshall Keeble, born in Rutherford County in 1878, became the best-known African American leader in the Churches of Christ of the twentieth century. In May 2000 The Christian Chronicle named Keeble as its person for the decade 1940 to 1950…

This Nashville barber, businessman, and politician became the first African American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly. Keeble was born circa 1832 in Rutherford County to slave parents, Sampson W. and Nancy Keeble. From the age of nineteen until 1863…

U.S. Congressman and Senator Estes Kefauver was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1956. Kefauver was born in Madisonville and received his education at the University of Tennessee (1924) and Yale Law School (1927). He practiced law in Chattanooga (1927-39) and…

This lawsuit filed by several African American families in 1955 to desegregate the Nashville public schools dramatically altered education patterns, and its various remedies continue to generate debate. The longest-running case in Tennessee history (the federal court in Nashville still…

Catherine Talty Kenny, suffragist and political activist, was born in Chattanooga in 1874. She married John M. Kenny of Atlanta in 1899 and moved to Nashville, where her husband became president of the Nashville Coca-Cola Bottling Company. Catherine Kenny became…

William Key, nineteenth-century veterinarian and horse trainer, was born a slave in Winchester and took the name of his owner, William Key, a Shelbyville planter and entrepreneur. As a child he demonstrated a remarkable talent for working with horses and…

New South advocate and first Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture, Joseph B. Killebrew was born May 29, 1831, in Montgomery County, the son of Bryan Whitfield and Elizabeth Smith Ligon Killebrew. In 1835 Bryan Killebrew bought a farm in adjoining Stewart…

The Holston Presbytery founded King College in 1867 in Bristol and named the school for James King, an eighteenth-century settler in the region. Both the acreage and physical plant of the college have more than doubled in 130 years. The…

Internationally acclaimed spokesman of the Civil Rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. King was in Memphis in an attempt to raise awareness of and support for a strike…

Kingsport was the first economically diversified, professionally planned, and privately financed city in twentieth-century America. Neither an Appalachian hamlet nor a company town, Kingsport developed as a self-proclaimed "All-American City." Affected by mergers, buyouts, and shifting economic trends, contemporary Kingsport…

Kingsport Press was a powerful Tennessee presence in the publishing world for fifty years. The press was initially established in 1922 by Blair and Company, the New York bankers who financed the Clinchfield Railway and the Kingsport town site, with…

An important early twentieth-century sculptor, Belle Kinney graced Nashville with works at the War Memorial Building, the State Capitol, and the Parthenon. Born in Nashville in 1890, one of four children of Captain D. C. and Elizabeth Morrison Kinney, she…